The BitWorm SEO Blog

I’m excited about the Motorola Droid. I’m not the only one. The press has been buzzing about it for the last few days. It finally looks like Verizon will potentially have a high quality iPhone quality offering.

If you’re someone who is tied to Verizon for whatever reason, you finally have a decent mobile option.

Everything looks to be lining up for the Droid to be a great success. Great network, a high quality device with attention to detail, great software via Andriod 2.0, no carrier functionality crippled features. It’s what Verizon users have been begging for.

The devil is in the details. Verizon’s greed will torpedo the potential for great success.

Most users will opt for the $20 data plan for 75MB of data per month. If you want to love and use this device like iPhone users love and use their iPhone, don’t expect to do it for that price. I smell bait and switch…let me explain.

What’s 75MB? People know what 60 minutes of talk times means, but 75MB is a meaningless number for most people, even techies.

What does 75MB represent? The average size of a webpage is 312KB, or .312MB.

The “big” 75MB data plan will entitle them to view 8 pages per day as part of the plan. Only 8 pages!

That does not take into account things like streaming of anything, application downloads, email attachments, etc.

On the 75MB plan, overages are $0.30/MB. Lets round up to .33MB to make the math easy. On average, every page after 75MB will cost you about 10 cents on average.

28 webpages per day? $2 extra per day. [(20-8) * .1 = $2.] By the end of the month, you’re hitting an extra $60 on your bill. That’s a lot for many people’s budgets. But you know what? You’re locked into a 2 year contract!

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t totally understand what options verizon has to upgrade from there, but you’ll basically have two options.

1. Pay more than you planned on…for two year
2. Limit your off-wifi use of the internet

Verizon wants $20 for 75MB of bandwidth. It’s worth noting that for other devices, $30 for 5GB is an option…that plan is not offered for the Droid as best as I can tell.

Seems to me like Verizon is trying to bait customers with a $20 data plan which is easily surpassed in normal usage based on the functionality of the device, then force them into paying more. Not fair, not nice, not good customer service, and I suspect people will be very angry once they start getting these bills.

8 pages a day. That’s a joke. I suspect this will blow up in their face, makes sales drop like a rock after the first billing period, and generally restrict sales and use of the Droid.

We’ll see…

While searching for a specific video of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, I stumbled upon this old recording of him from a public speaking class.

After you get past the look of the 1988 Eric Schmidt, starting around 3 minutes in he has some interesting things to say about leadership and management, and there are some interesting correlations to draw to where he is today.

I was specifically hit by talk about conflict, or management through disagreement, starting around 6 minutes in. He spoke about this very recently during an interview by McKinsley, which is actually the video I was seeking out when I found this blast from the past. His delivery has improved.

I am a big proponent of a method that is part SEO, part informationation architecture, called the SEO Silo.  At one point on WebMasterWorld, this method was described as a Theme Pyramid, but the SEO Silo seems to be the term that has stuck.

Basically, for a site that covers more than one topic niche, the idea is to break down the topics into their niches, and then only link within each niche.

By restricting links to be within a niche, it helps focus the relevance on that very specific niche.

Here are some videos from YouTube of Bruce Clay and and Ralph Wilson discussing the SEO Silo concept.

- Part 1 of 2 -

- Part 2 of 2 -

I just read an interesting post over at SEO Bandy about valid code giving a significant boost in the search engine rankings.  In a way it makes perfect sense, and in a way it’s hard to believe.

What makes this more interesting is that there are roots in a Matt Cutts quote.  Matt is in an interesting position.  He knows a lot of ranking information he can’t directly talk about.  That’s why his words are examined by SEO’s is if this were Wall Street disecting the words of the Fed Chairman.  Could be nothing, or he could know a lot more than he’s letting on.

I’d agrue returning “valid” pages is in Google’s best interest in terms of generic page quality.  A web page that passes HTML validation should in theory render well in any web browser a searcher happens to be using.  If a page isn’t valid, it’s a gamble whether the page will render for the searcher, although in practice the vast majority will render well enough.

From that standpoint, I can see why Google may give a boost to valid pages.

On the flip side, experience tells me that the vast majority of pages on the Internet won’t pass a validation test.  Sure, most are very close to valid, but few actually pass.

I’ve thought for a long time that there is a certain quality bar that needs to be crossed.  For example, I wrote a crawler recently which collected some key stats for every page on a site.  I was suprised to find a handful of pages where the resulting info just didn’t make any sense.  On investigation, it seems extra body tags were the culprate.

My crawler established it’s own quality bar.  Each of those pages with extra body tags would have been improperly indexed by my crawler, and possibly Google’s as well.

So, is having code that passed validation really a factor?  Is this why I never run into “best view on Internet Explorer” pages any more?  I don’t think the experience of SEO Bandy is enough to base a decision and reaction on…but I smell a SEO test in my future.